Up at 6:30, I went at the email and working on blog posts. This one consists of what I read and did not have time to write about in separate posts.
From The Guardian's Robot takeover? Not quite. Here’s what AI doomsday would look like:
Such systems could be weaponized by bad actors to purposely spread misinformation at a large scale, said Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill, co-CEOs of NewsGuard. This is particularly concerning in high-stakes news events, as we have already seen with intentional manipulation of information in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“You have malign actors who can generate false narratives and then use the system as a force multiplier to disseminate that at scale,” Crovitz said. “There are people who say the dangers of AI are being overstated, but in the world of news information it is having a staggering impact.”
Recent examples have ranged from the more benign, like the viral AI-generated image of the Pope wearing a “swagged-out jacket”, to fakes with potentially more dire consequences, like an AI-generated video of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, announcing a surrender in April 2022.
“Misinformation is the individual [AI] harm that has the most potential and highest risk in terms of larger-scale potential harms,” said Rebecca Finlay, of the Partnership on AI. “The question emerging is: how do we create an ecosystem where we are able to understand what is true? How do we authenticate what we see online?”
Ottessa Moshfegh was one of those writers I had heard of and did not get a chance to read until prison. I read Eileen there. I think there may be something in her that may be more important than the hype, but I have not read enough. The Guardian's interview, Ottessa Moshfegh: ‘I’m not brainstorming ways to freak people out’, reinforces my hope. Two items caught my eye; you may find more in the interview relevant to you.
Some critics say you’re just out to shock.
Why is that considered so cheap? It’s really hard to shock people; every human emotion has been exploited by media. Yeah, I use elements of horror. But I’m not brainstorming ways to freak people out. If I wanted to shock, I wouldn’t write Lapvona. It’s my most personal book. Eileen was manipulative, because I was working in a genre where I could put people to sleep with the music of this writing and then try to deliver the excitement [of a twist]. But Lapvona was not ... like, my God, the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?
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Name a writer who first inspired you.
Something in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, about it being best to go to museums when you’re really hungry, might be the first time a book resonated with me as a kid. I was like, oh, I get that, I totally get that; I want to be alive like that and try to get the most out of art.
Ed Ames, Singer and ‘Daniel Boone’ Sidekick, Dies at 95
Another Gospodinov article, International Booker Prize Winners on Nostalgia, Translation, and ‘Time Shelter’, and since I think our American situation, a fixation on nostalgia for a world I do not think actually existed, and I do like what I have read of his work, I think we need to pay attention to this writer.
One of the “big issues” that all of Gospodinov’s work, and particularly Time Shelter, deals with is the past—namely “the dangers of the past, and the danger that comes with nostalgia for the past.” The impetus for this latest novel were the events of 2016, “a time when there was a glitch in time, and things really shifted.” Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, his inquiry into nostalgia has grown all the more urgent: “This war is a war for the past,” he says. In his experience, Eastern European writers in particular “understand very quickly this obsession that dictators have with the past—because every war brings the world back into the past.”
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As for Gospodinov, he appreciates that the Booker celebrates nuance, artistry, and complexity in the literature it recognizes. To him, the award is “not just a recognition of the importance of the themes in Time Shelter but also of the style, the poetry, the complexity of the book—because it is a complex book.” He finds the Award’s mission to be especially important “in this time of reduction, especially in the media, when everything’s reduced to the simplest message.”
“We shouldn’t give in,” he says. “We want to continue reading complex literature.”
What else I have written about Gospodinov.
Lust, Loss, and Liberation in Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Kairos’ - grief without sentimentality; that doesn't pique your interest?
I Have Never Felt That I Have Roots: The Millions Interviews Isabel Allende
I know not a single Taylor Swift song, so I might have missed all the points in Taylor Swift Answers Walt Whitman’s Questions by Dani Bostick from McSweeney's. I still think the idea is a fun one.
I probably should a longer post on Rebecca F Kuang rejects idea authors should not write about other races from The Guardian, but I am out of time this morning. I know how little I know, that I have had only story published, but it seems to me who does the writing but what is written that is important. I would have no idea how to write a Chinese character, there are none in my sights, not knowing any means I do not how they think or feel, and so I would not. To presume to know what one does not know feels like the road to stereotypes.
The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.
Speaking at the Hay festival, the author, who was born in China but moved to the US when she was four, said that there is a “really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing”. She is “sympathetic” to an extent, as it is coming from “decades of frustration of seeing the same racist, uncritical, under-researched, shallow stereotypes”.
The problem is, Kuang thinks, is that this has now “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”. As a result, a movement that began as a call for more authentic stories about marginalised communities “gets flipped around and weaponised against the marginalised writers to pigeonhole them into telling only certain kinds of stories”.
I suspect minority writers know more, can write more, about the majority culture than I could about minority cultures.
Two Errol Flynn movies later, I need to quit. Laundry needs done, which means going down to get laundry detergent. My first bout of exercise.
sch 11:51 AM
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